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Ivory Aloe

Paloma Robles

    I read it in the New York Times: Bomb Making Factory Found in Brooklyn Apartment of Columbia Professor.

    The professor was called Michael Clatts. He was living with a thirty five year old man named Ivanov, an illegal immigrant from Bulgaria, who shot his finger accidentally in Clatt’s apartment. Ivanov was wearing a bullet-proof jacket when he walked into the hospital, and this rose suspicions about his version of the events: he said he had been shot in the streets by a stranger. The police searched the apartment and found seven pipe bombs already filled with powder, silencers, a shotgun, and other bomb manufacturing equipment. The building was evacuated. A woman living in the premises had praised the way the police had handled the whole affair. “They did everything not to alarm us,” she said, “and they helped us take our cats out.” I pictured the woman: a fat sixty year old spinster, secure behind the walls of her luxurious Brooklyn apartment.

    Michael Clatts was Huso’s research partner at Columbia University, also his close friend. They worked on sexuality and HIV/AIDS prevention, but according to the New York Times reporter, Clatts was “an expert in the spread of contagious diseases.”

    This story is not the story of Michael Clatts.
    It is not the story of Ivanov.
    It is the story of how I got to meet Huso Yi.

    When I laid down the newspaper, back in my Beijing apartment, I recalled the scene at the restaurant near Huso’s hotel, when he told me about the unexpected call. His expression of consternation, and his eyes, tamed, deep-set, unevasive. Huso had probably received a great deal of similar calls during his twenty years as an activist. The same as Wan, my former boss, and also the most prominent human rights activist in China, he had been in jail three times. “The first time, they found a Marxist book in my backpack,” Huso said to me. The second time, and the third, they found the bombs. “I used to be the type of boy who organized student protests and threw bombs in the streets” he said.

    He was born and raised in Seoul, and he was the founder of the first queer student activist group in South Korea. One of the most painful memories of his years as a student was the public exorcism performed on him by the Chair of a fundamentalist Christian student organization. But he was lucky, he said. Three of his friends had committed suicide after disclosing their homosexuality and another one was left permanently injured as a result of police torture.

    I liked Huso for his simple, detached, natural attitude towards life and sex, and the main reason why I remember him, and our fleeting two-day encounter during that coldest Beijing winter, is because I shared with him a soulful and invigorating sexual experience.

    Huso was different from Wan. They were both human rights activists and they both had been in jail three times, but when I first met Huso in the Korean restaurant near Wan’s office, and I glanced at them sitting side by side, they struck me as totally different people. Wan was a lonely man. With his shaded glasses and the plastic sandals he used to wear to the office in sultry summer days, he was someone totally out of tune with his surroundings. There was a look of hostility and mistrust in his eyes, and visible signs of a subdued tension in the way he clenched his lower jaw. A sense of deep-hidden panic mixed with courage and pride. He was slippery, difficult to make out, a man living in a permanent state of fear and nerve-racking paranoia. Who knows, maybe because Huso was living in a democratic country, but I could find no trace of such fear in his eyes. He was confident, balanced, full of perspective.

    I sat next to him at the restaurant, and the first thing I noticed was his light smell of perfume and Aloe Vera soap. Ivory Aloe. Later, during the dinner we had by ourselves, I asked him what he wanted to be when he was a child. “A chemist,” he replied. “I wanted to make the best perfume in the world.” He had strong, beautiful hands, which would shake every time he held his chopsticks or reached for his glass of beer. Later, he told me he was never able make it as a chemist, because he was disqualified for his trembling hands. He passed the written exam but he failed the lab test. He felt betrayed by his school, and he had to give up his perfumed dream. I wondered, but I never asked, whether that was or not his first betrayal in life, whether his future years as an activist bore or not a secret reminiscence of that experience.
    There were many things I never asked.

    The people I usually feel attracted to are those whose lives are tainted with bitterness and filled with little frustrations. It is always the same profile against a different background. With my novels, it is the same. I tend to look for a clearer understanding of human nature in small manifestations of failure and loss.

    Huso was different from all that, and that was also one of the reasons why he left such a permanent imprint in my memory. He was thirty eight. He told me he had never had a middle age crisis. “And I think I never will.” There was something thoroughly convincing in the way he spoke. I searched for his eyes, and he held my gaze. He was wearing a dark woolen scarf and a rolled collar pullover. With his small glasses and his green striped Adidas, he looked like a true New Yorker.

    After dinner, he picked a bar in Sanlitun Street, a chill-out place with high ceilings and white empty walls. “It doesn’t feel I am in Beijing,” he said to me. “And it doesn’t feel I am in New York either.” It felt the same to me, a no man’s land, timeless, with only the smoke of our cigarettes, and our words, to fill the emptiness.

    We both knew from the beginning that it was only sex. Sex on the one hand, friendship on the other, two things that would grow separately, allowed to coexist, but not to mingle or intersect.

    The cab driver who drove us to the tea street in his last afternoon in Beijing asked me if we were colleagues.
    “No”, I said.
    “Then?”
    “Friends”
    It sounded odd to me: a two-day friendship.

    The bar in Sanlitun had four golden fish swimming in two glistening crystal bowls. I remember the silence of semi-transparent fins waddling in clean water. Our words echoing against the empty walls. And our words again, inconsistent, like billowing shadows flashing past the walls, their meaning distorted, severed, mutilated by desire. This is probably why I can only remember broken conversations. It meant the same that we talked about everything or talked about nothing.

    We spoke about writing, and he understood quickly, without me having to explain.
    “Someone said that if you want to be a better person, you should write a diary” He said.
    “A better person” He said again, checking himself, as if unsatisfied with his choice of words. He blushed. Did that sound too vague or too simplistic maybe?
    “What does it mean to be a writer?” We didn’t ask that question, but it was there, floating in the air, in the absence of words, the silence.
    “A writer is someone who writes” I said.
    “A writer is not a profession. It’s a way of being in the world.”
    It was my turn to blush. Did that sound too vague or too simplistic maybe?
    I was afraid of words. Of saying too much. Of simply saying. Saying something that he would find disappointing and that would break the spell of desire.

    And I was also afraid of looks. Petrified by the intensity of his gaze. When we got off the subway and stood face to face on the escalators, I tried to hold his gaze for a few seconds. I failed. It felt like a knife edge crisscrossing my mouth, my eyes, my cheeks. Burning all over.

    I smoked Korean cigarettes and we drank a full bottle of Spanish wine. “When did you start smoking?” He asked.
    “Fifteen,” I said.
    I told him about my school friend and about how we would sit on the ledge outside a private parking and light up our first cigarettes.
    “The taste and smell of your first cigarettes is totally different from how they taste later,” I wanted to say, but I never did.
    There were many things I didn’t say.
    Fifteen was also the time of my first sex.
    “Was that before or after smoking?” He asked.
    Huso was only politically gay. In life, he liked to sleep with both women and men. I felt a sense of real empathy with his beliefs, also some kind of admiration towards his calm, honest, detached attitude towards sexuality. He didn’t ask himself many questions. He was just happy doing what he did. In that respect, he was different from many people I had met before, from those who failed to match their actions and their beliefs, from those who claimed a free attitude towards sex but always ended up caught up in a complicated maze of emotions.

    Huso spoke about sex the same way he spoke about champagne and caviar, taking pleasure in dissecting the multiple layers of sensation, the slippery fish-skin of black men, the intensity of his first Mexican lover, the languor and compliance of his first eighteen-year old boyfriend.
    I wondered how he would describe sex between us: wordless, intense.

    He said thirty should be the best time of my life.
    Was it for him?
    I didn’t ask.
    I was still twenty eight.
    I told him about my wisdom teeth. About the X-rays when I was twelve.
    “They said my wisdom teeth would come out eventually. And that it would hurt”.
    There was the image of my father coming back from the dentist: the confirmation that it did hurt, on his strained, worn out face. The panic. The fear. Not so much the pain but the torture of anticipation.
    There were millions of things in life more painful than wisdom teeth.
    “But still...” I said.
    Fear is something that you can’t control.
    Just like desire.
    “And what happened in the end?’ He asked.
    “With the teeth? I kept imagining how it would be like ten years before it happened. With no certainty that it would happen at all.”
    “And now?”
    “I still have them”

    I remember little more.
    The phone call from Columbia University. “They will probably search my desk and my computer,” he said. “Only condoms and maybe some cheap porn.”
    His full-lipped mouth.
    The taste of his kisses.

    He had one of those faces difficult to forget. A kaleidoscopic repertory of expressions. He reminded me of a different person depending on the angle from which he looked.

    He said he wanted me. He said that after we left the restaurant and the table full of uneaten food. Not just leftovers, but plates full of meat.
    “I want you too”.
    “You don’t know how much I want you.”
    That’s what I would have liked to say, but I was paralyzed by desire. I couldn’t say it. Or say it only very low, unconvincingly, meaninglessly. That’s the thing with desire: it makes it difficult for words to come out. It makes it hard to talk. It makes you leave uneaten food on the table. It has a violence which sweeps everything away.

    The second time, he said it in a different way. He didn’t say “I want you”. He just said “Can you come to my hotel for a while?” Only for a while, because he was sick, brown sick, with yellow skin and still hands wrapped inside green woolen gloves, resting on the table.

    Huso’s style in bed was neat and precise. His body was soft and slender, light and spongy like a piece of cheesecake, and his skin almost as slippery as the skin of those black lovers he spoke about. He had the habit of lighting up a cigarette in the bathroom after sex. He would pace up and down the carpet of the hotel room, with a cigarette in his hand, completely naked. With his tall, elastic body, his slightly hunched back, and his short black stylish hair sweeping over his forehead, he looked so gay. I could never get rid of the impression that I was having sex with a gay man, which maybe didn’t tell much about him, but rather showed that I was not as open-minded as I claimed to be. I was simply projecting my own sexuality on him, my reluctance or inability to define my own sexual orientation, yet the need to do so.

    It was perhaps that indifference towards being something, or simply the way he was content with being nothing and being everything at the same time, which I liked so much about him. Half gay. Half straight. Half activist. Half DJ. Half counselor and half researcher. Full of enthusiasm towards the multiplicity of choices in life. He enjoyed quiet evenings drinking wine, and he had taken a course in creative writing. After giving up his dream of being a chemist, he decided to be a play writer. He gave up, probably not because it was a hard profession in South Korea, as he said, but because he had found in political activism a new calling.

    I asked him about his job as a counselor. “Many stories,” he said. I remember the one about a Japanese boy who came to the United States searching for his American dream. Instead of that, he was raped by the landlord from whom he rented his first apartment and infected with HIV. Huso smiled bitterly, a smile full of compassion and generosity.

    His hotel room had a large window with a view over the rooftops of a small hutong. I heard the sound of trickling water in the bathroom. He was taking a shower. He would soon come out again pouring out his smell of Ivory Aloe. I looked out of the window: old women riding bicycles, clouds of steam drifting towards the sky, people trailing big barrels of mineral water. It seemed like China again, but still a distant, far-away China, unfolding gradually, insulated behind the windows of the hotel room.
    I stayed over at his hotel. I saw him again the day after.
    Then I left.
    I didn’t feel the cold lashing on my cheeks.
    I think I did miss him after he left. I kept reading the story I wrote about him again and again, obsessively, until I learnt it almost by heart, numb to the meaning of words on paper. Trying to retrieve his presence. To quell a sense of unrest. To preserve that isolated, self-contained episode against the unforgiving crush of routine and reality.
    It was not the sex which stayed with me.
    Not the words.
    But the smell of Ivory Aloe.

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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.